This handbook offers a deep analysis of the main forms of legal reasoning and argumentation from both a logical-philosophical and legal perspective. These forms are covered in an exhaustive and critical fashion, and the handbook accordingly divides in three parts: the first one introduces and discusses the basic concepts of practical reasoning. The second one discusses the main general forms of reasoning and argumentation relevant for legal discourse. The third one looks at their application in law as well as at (...) the different areas of legal reasoning. The handbook’s division in three parts reflects its conceptual architecture, since legal reasoning and argumentation are considered in relation to the more general types of reasoning. (shrink)

In our postmodern, secular, and liberal society, many individuals are struggling with a crisis of meaningful desire. In response, the goal of preaching Catholic bioethics should be to help people to order their desires so that they are all oriented toward their authentic good. This is done by infusing their intellects with truth and by exhorting them to order their appetites and emotions with virtue. Specifically, preachers should speak about bioethics in a way that shows our brothers and sisters that (...) the moral truths of the Gospel will help them to find joy. However, it is not enough to speak about joy. One should never speak about these controversial and deeply personal issues without also speaking about the mercy of God. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 14.2 : 217–226. (shrink)

Disagreement plays an important role in several philosophical debates, with intuitions about ordinary or exotic cases of agreement and disagreement being invoked to support or undermine competing semantic, epistemological and metaphysical views. In this paper we discuss cases of interworld doxastic disagreement, that is to say, cases of doxastic disagreement supposedly obtaining between individuals inhabiting different possible worlds, in particular between an individual inhabiting the actual world and his/her counterpart in another possible world. We draw a distinction between propositional and (...) attitudinal disagreement, bring it to bear on the issue of the conditions of this kind of disagreement, and raise some metaphysical and epistemological worries about the claim that an individual inhabiting the actual world can disagree with an attitude or a speech act of his/her own counterpart, or of another individual, in a different possible world. (shrink)

People categorize objects slowly when visual input is highly impoverished instead of optimal. While bottom-up models may explain a decision with optimal input, perceptual hypothesis testing (PHT) theories implicate top-down processes with impoverished input. Brain mechanisms and the time course of PHT are largely unknown. This event-related potential study used a neuroimaging paradigm that implicated prefrontal cortex in top-down modulation of occipitotemporal cortex. Subjects categorized more impoverished and less impoverished real and pseudo objects. PHT theories predict larger impoverishment effects for (...) real than pseudo objects because top-down processes modulate knowledge only for real objects, but different PHT variants predict different timing. Consistent with parietal-prefrontal PHT variants, around 250 ms, the earliest impoverished real object interaction started on an N3 complex, which reflects interactive cortical activity for object cognition. N3 impoverishment effects localized to both prefrontal and occipitotemporal cortex for real objects only. The N3 also showed knowledge effects by 230 ms that localized to occipitotemporal cortex. Later effects reflected (a) word meaning in temporal cortex during the N400, (b) internal evaluation of prior decision and memory processes and secondary higher-order memory involving anterotemporal parts of a default mode network during posterior positivity (P600), and (c) response related activity in posterior cingulate during an anterior slow wave (SW) after 700 ms. Finally, response activity in supplementary motor area during a posterior SW after 900 ms showed impoverishment effects that correlated with RTs. Convergent evidence from studies of vision, memory, and mental imagery which reflects purely top-down inputs, indicates that the N3 reflects the critical top-down processes of PHT. A hybrid multiple-state interactive, PHT and decision theory best explains the visual constancy of object cognition. (shrink)

The dialogue focuses on the major issues of the contemporary theoretical debate on judicial review and the Supreme Court's role in American constitutional democracy. The discussion begins with the US Supreme Court's case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, successfully argued by Prof. Katyal last year, and covers important issues such as the separation and balance of powers after 9/11, the legitimacy of the laws of terror, the relation between US constitutional law and foreign law, the counter‐majoritarian difficulties posed by the exercise of (...) judicial review, and the legal academy's influence on legal practice. (shrink)

La domanda "chi è l´uomo?" è un interrogativo esistenzialmente cruciale per ognuno di noi: non lo si può eludere. Per chi accoglie la Rivelazione cristiana la domanda si fa ancora più coinvolgente perchè la Sacra Scrittura ci insegna che l´uomo è creato a immagine e somiglianza di Dio e l´immagine perfetta di Dio è il Figlio Unigenito, Gesù Cristo. San Tommaso approfondisce queste categorie bibliche nella sua prima opera sistematica, lo "Scritto sulle Sentenze", aprendo delle prospettive quasi del tutto ignorate, (...) come la relazione tra immagine di Dio e la coscienza di sé, o la presenza dell'immagine di Dio anche nella corporeità umana. Inoltre, egli sviluppa il tema dell´assimilazione a Dio e della divinizzazione dell'uomo mediante l'immagine divina prodotta dalla grazia santificante e dalla gloria eterna. (shrink)

Gargani's work aims at discovering the link connecting the multifarious aspects of contemporary Austrian culture in the connection between ethics and aesthetics. In Gargani's view this connection is responsible for the strong criticism of contemporary society, based on mechanization and automatic processes, as it is instanced by such authors as F. Kafka, L. Wittgenstein, R. Musil, I. Bachmann and above all Thomas Bernhard. According to Gargani's essay, starting from the rejection of the notion of a correspondence relation of language to (...) the world, T. Bernhard puts forward a sort of literature conceived no more as being a description of reality, but rather as being a critical analysis and a deconstruction of human existence. In substance, the core of Bernhard's literary work consists in revealing the truth content of the lie (der Wahrheitsgehalt der Lüge). If human existence on the whole is doomed to failure on the one hand, Bernhard acknowledges literature itself as the only possibility of safety for man on the other hand. On clarifying the peculiar structure of Bernhard's writing, Gargani shows how the indirect narration of events and thoughts carried out by Bernhard aims at an indirect truth, which is the only available one and which is preciselythe mediated truth of literature. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer was one of the seminal works of political philosophy in recent decades. It was also the beginning of a series of interconnected investigations of staggering ambition and scope, investigating the deepest foundations of Western politics and thought. The Use of Bodies represents the ninth and final volume in this twenty-year undertaking, breaking considerable new ground while clarifying the stakes and implications of the project as a whole. It comprises three major sections. The first uses Aristotle's (...) discussion of slavery as a starting point for radically rethinking notions of selfhood; the second calls for a complete reworking of Western ontology; and the third explores the enigmatic concept of "form-of-life," which is in many ways the motivating force behind the entire Homo Sacer project. Interwoven between these major sections are shorter reflections on individual thinkers, while the epilogue pushes toward a new approach to political life that breaks with the destructive deadlocks of Western thought. The Use of Bodies represents a true masterwork by one of our greatest living philosophers. (shrink)

How and why did experience and knowledge become separated? Is it possible to talk of an infancy of experience, a "dumb" experience? For Walter Benjamin, the "poverty of experience" was a characteristic of modernity, originating in the catastrophe of the First World War. For Giorgio Agamben, the Italian editor of Benjamin's complete works, the destruction of experience no longer needs catastrophes: daily life in any modern city will suffice. Agamben's profound and radical exploration of language, infancy, and everyday life (...) traces concepts of experience through Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Benveniste. In doing so he elaborates a theory of infancy that throws new light on a number of major themes in contemporary thought: the anthropological opposition between nature and culture; the linguistic opposition between speech and language; the birth of the subject and the appearance of the unconscious. Agamben goes on to consider time and history; the Marxist notion of base and superstructure (via a careful reading of the famous Adorno–Benjamin correspondence on Baudelaire's Paris); and the difference between rituals and games. Beautifully written, erudite and provocative, these essays will be of great interest to students of philosophy, linguistics, anthropology and politics. (shrink)

Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886-1967) was not only an eminent Islamologist, belonging to that tradition of Italian Oriental studies that stretches from Ignazio Guidi to Leone Caetani, Carlo Alfonso Nallino and Francesco Gabrieli - he was also a man with solid roots in his own time. He taught in Naples and Rome, then for the ten years 1939-1948 at the University of Pennsylvania. He was one of the few university teachers who, when the oath of loyalty to the Italian (...) fascist regime was introduced, in October 1931, opted not to accept that act of submission. (shrink)

Semblanza de G. Tagliacozzo a través de las distintas voces que, desde su infancia hasta su muerte, lo llamaron en su vida: las primeras vocaciones de grandeza , las voces de la academia , la voz de América , la impelente voz de Vico , la voz de los caminos que la naturaleza recorre .Semblance of G. Tagliacozzo through the voices that he followed from his younger age to his death: the first calls for greatness , the voices of academy (...) , the voice of America , the impelling voice of Vico , and the voice of the ways that nature runs. (shrink)

In this philosophical detective story, Giorgio Agamben reads the mysterious 1938 disappearance of atomic physicist Ettore Majorana as an intentional and decisive objection to how quantum physics had reduced the real to probability.